Quotes About Doris Lessing

I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'

I hated the 1960's feminists, she says. They were dogmatists, you see. In comes ideology, and out goes common sense. This is my experience of life.

Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don't seem to see this.

The charge that the United Nations are using bacteriological warfare in Korea cannot be dismissed merely because it would be insane.

I watched his face put on that mask of bluff, goodnatured tolerance which is the mask of corruption in this particular time (for

I don't think there's a pattern anywhere - you are just making patterns, out of cowardice. I think people aren't good at all, they are cannibals, and when you get down to it no one cares about anyone else.

I remember someone saying that the importance of any public man can be gauged by the number of mellifluous young men he has about him.

Sometimes I think the one form of experience people are incapable of learning from is the political experience.

What is history? A record of misery, brutality and stupidity. That'a all. That's all it ever will be.

I have to conclude that fiction is better at "the truth" than a factual record. Why this should be so is a very large subject and one I don't begin to understand. DORIS LESSING

I see I am falling into the self-punishing, cynical tone again. Yet how comforting this tone is, like a sort of poultice on a wound.

Pagan? Ah,that is a joyous word for the aridity of Godless modern man!

As soon as I got the Nobel Prize my back collapsed and I was in hospital.

Some writers are so enthralled by ideas (one thinks of Doris Lessing) that their characters become debaters, and their fables approach allegory.

I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.

When Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature at the age of 88, she was the oldest person ever to receive the prize and one of only 11 female winners in its history. Her award was the end of a very long journey from a remote farm in Rhodesia to a banquet at Stockholm's Stadshus, the grand city hall in Stockholm.

I hated the 1960's feminists," she says. "They were dogmatists, you see. In comes ideology, and out goes common sense. This is my experience of life.

What they [critics of Lessing's switch to science fiction] didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time.

I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.

I don't think San Francisco needs defending. I never meet anyone who doesn't love the place, Americans or others.

I see every book as a problem that you have to solve. That is what dictates the form you use. It's not that you say, 'I want to write a science fiction book.' You start from the other end, and what you have to say dictates the form of it.